Carrie Yamaoka
b. 1957, Glen Cove, NY
Lipstick Traces, 1989
Oilstick on photostat, wood panel

Steal This Book #2, 1993
Unique chemically manipulated silver gelatin print
Courtesy the artist, Commonwealth and Council, and Ulterior Gallery

Carrie Yamaoka’s practice spans painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture, probing issues of identity, authorship, perception, and visibility. Since the 1980s, her work has explored textual inscriptions on psychological surfaces and social structures, and examined the instability of subjectivity in painting.

Drawing from Abbie Hoffman’s countercultural classic, Yamaoka’s Steal This Book #2 is part of her 1990–1993 Banned series. In this body of work, the artist photographed pages from books censored in the United States, including Ulysses by James Joyce, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, Lolita by Nabokov, and Another Country by James Baldwin. Bleached by Farmer’s Reducer, a trade-name chemical gelatin commonly used for photo retouching, Steal This Book #2 is a silver print of a partially erased page from Hoffman’s book, transforming into a reflection on the AIDS crisis. The work can be understood as testament to a time when language and representation began to decouple from concrete social reality, and identity politics faced its limits in American society.

Yamaoka is also a founding member of fierce pussy, an art collective that engages with “lesbian identity and queer culture in the public sphere.”